About the artist:Tahiti Pehrson started experimenting with art the old-fashioned way: out of sheer boredom. Reared by a pair of back-to-the-land bohemians in Nevada City, he grew up in a house that had no electricity but lots of art supplies. “If we wanted something to do, we had to make it,” he says. “You had to make stuff to have stuff.” Out of this enforced austerity emerged a talent for repetitive, painstaking works like these hand-cut paper tapestries, featured through March 3 in a 13-piece show at the University of San Francisco’s Thacher Gallery.

Since his stint at the San Francisco Art Institute 15 years ago, Pehrson has been making paper-cut art. To create this series, he went through 7,600 razor blades, the cost of slicing intricate guilloche patterns into white compressed cotton-rag paper. Needless to say, this is laborious stuff: One 5-by-7-foot panel took Pehrson a full week of 16-hour workdays to complete, and the largest panels here measure 5 by 13 feet. The payoff for the artist is seeing how viewers react to his output. “A lot of people come to my shows and say, ‘I want to climb into that,’” he says. “I like to encourage that interaction: It’s not you versus the artwork, it’s you inside the artwork.” You can get inside his next exhibition this summer (June 3–30) at K. Imperial Fine Art.